The West Bank settlement project emerged from a messianic conviction that by crossing into Judea and Samaria one can cross a temporal border between mundane reality and the times of redemption. But what happens to this temporal imagination after years go by and time passes without an end of time in sight? And what can people’s relation to objects tell us about their understanding of time?
Based on twenty months of fieldwork in a West Bank outpost, in this talk, I show how small pretty things can function as sites where social actors mediate their temporal experience. I suggest that in the case of West Bank settlement society, by looking at such seemingly mundane objects, we learn about a new understanding of time among the second-generation of settlers.
In the outpost, most members are somewhat part-time artists, creating sculptures and jewelry from materials such as ceramics, clay, car debris, and leftover ammunition. Drawing on Arendt’s concept of homo faber and anthropological studies of materiality, I show how the craze around the fabrication of artifacts in the outpost reveals a certain desire for grounding among its members. I argue that this desire designates a retreat from the world of linear temporality, logos, and politics, in the vein of their Gush Emunim parents, to what I coin as ‘post-messianic’ temporality; the state in which in their temporal disorientation these nominally religious subjects resort from the transcendental to the concrete in order to find spatial anchoring in the present.